Shot of the Summer. Caught offhand on the Kings Road, coming out of Chelsea Registry Office. She look so happy, and the colours are so vivid. I wish I’d been quick enough to take more than one shot.
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Stacey
We got to spend my Birthday week in Marbella again, which is one of my favourite things to do. And we got to spend my actual Birthday at Purobeach. It was an ace day.
In fact, the whole week was ace. We spent time lying down, eating, drinking and generally relaxing. So many highlights, including disovering a new-ish restaurant from local chef Dani Garcia. Lobito de Mar was a fanstastic discovery – fresh seafood, little nibbles, HUGE martini’s and all set in a stylish, Hamptons-vibe restaurant. Of course, we opted to sit at the bar, which is always first choice for me.
We stayed at the NH just outside Marbella, which is cost-effective and really good value. They’ve got a nice pool and you can easily get around the local area. The local bus stops practically outside, the cabs are not too expensive and it’s a lovely stroll along the beach in either direction to Marbella or Puerto Banus. We’ve been there so many times before the Wifi picked up my phone both at the hotel and the neighbouring bar, Boca Seca.
This time, as well as Lobito de Mar, we ate at a few different places. We found excellent Pinxos in Marbella called Le Kune, we had great cocktails at Trocadero Playa and we travelled the other side of Marbella to go to The Beach House. A bit of a trek, but the food and Cosmo’s made up for it. We also lunched at La Milla and ate (excellent) ‘experimental’ tapas by streelight in Marbella old town at Garnacha.
I can’t wait to go back.
This was originally posted on the We Are Friday website.
A lot of companies like to talk about what a great place to work they are. At Friday we like to demonstrate it. When it came to overhauling our benefits package, we started by asking the people who work here what benefits they would choose.
This isn’t so surprising, it’s how we’d approach a client project: start with discovery, in this case market and user research; then draw up a list of recommendations; pilot the most promising; gather feedback and decide what to scale.
So we started with an all-staff survey of suggestions for new benefits or improvements to current ones.
More than moolah
Like every agency, we’re in stiff competition for talent. When it comes to choosing an employer, people naturally look first to answer the two big questions: how much will I be paid and what work will I be doing? But research shows that firms which compete on salary alone don’t always attract the best talent.
We know that people want to work where they feel personally valued, not just priced as resources. We have a lofty aim to make Friday the best job you’ve ever had in the best place you’ve ever worked.
For a lot of people, time is their most valuable commodity. Yet often they don’t even take their annual holiday allowance, carrying days over year after year.
Consequently, one of the ideas we surveyed was reduced summer working hours in place of a limited holiday carry-over entitlement. This enabled permanent staff to finish work at 2pm on Fridays through June, July and August, the equivalent of 3½ days a year extra paid holiday. Obviously, clients were not billed for the time.
Time trials
This proved to be the most popular idea we floated, so we put it to the test. People used the extra time for various purposes: taking part in social, cultural and sporting activities, increasing family time, clearing housework in preparation for a weekend away, or just extending weekend down-time.
I wanted to learn to use my camera properly, so I went on a photo-safari to the South Bank. On another afternoon, I went to the Royal Academy summer show. Both of these are things it’s unlikely I would have got around to doing at the weekend.
Nick, Technical Director at Friday and a new father, used summer hours for a balance of extra family time and just to get out on his bicycle.
“In June I went off and did a bloody good bike ride in the Chilterns,” he says. “Whistling through the country hedgerows, sun shining, knowing everyone else is cooped up in an office. That felt good, and I felt genuinely thankful for the perk.”
It would be unfair to say that everyone has been 100% happy all the time. Some mentioned extra stress managing teams and clients, and a few people said they felt under pressure to manage their time much more carefully to fit in a 2pm exit on Fridays. Mind you, a few also said they felt it made them more time conscious and productive! It’s all a work in progress, and we’ve learned a lot from our experiences so far.
What else?
As part of the benefits overhaul, Friday also increased the employee pension contribution, organised weekly massages and introduced a shopping and entertainment voucher discount scheme, in addition to the existing perks.
Massage has been popular with some, and after an initial burst of enthusiasm, the voucher scheme could probably do with some internal re-promotion. But, not only did reduced summer working hours score best in the survey, it has also proved to be scheme which most people have used and reported real benefit from (so far). We expected people to manage the expectations of clients and stakeholders in the projects they’re in, and be flexible if needed. And it looks like the pros have outweighed the cons.
We’re always keen to learn what makes people happy at work. Chances are, reduced summer hours will become a regular feature at Friday, but we’ll be capturing more staff feedback as the year goes on.
I’ve always loved the new term feeling that you get at the beginning of September. It’s a feeling of new-ness and starting over, with the added bonus of it also being my Birthday early in the month. So, literally the start of a new year for me. This year, it’s not just new pencil cases and pens though, there’s an extra reason for excitement – We Are Friday has moved office.
Our last day at Harella House was the day before my holiday, so returning to work tomorrow is going to be fun – new desk in a new building, though thankfully still in my beloved Farringdon. In fact, the new building is one I used to see everyday when I worked directly across the road from it, so I know it well. I’ll be able to visit old, favourite haunts up on Leather Lane and find new places for lunch.
California is one of my favourite places on the planet and when I saw this exhibition advertised, I was very keen to go and to understand more about how it came to have such a powerful influence on contemporary design. Not only that, I’d not yet been to the new Design Museum in Kensington, so it was being able to combine both, along with it being my Mother-in-Law’s Birthday that provided the perfect prompting for a day out.
The exhibition explores the ideas around how 60’s counterculture of surfers, feminists, gay and black activists and hippies all influenced the California design movement that has developed into Silicon Valley tech culture. It makes a bold point about how this has had such an effect on all of our lives that it means that we are now all, in some ways, now Californians.
The artefacts on show – which open with a shining sun and include films, magazine covers, posters, hardware, physical items, virtual reality, skateboards and acid tabs are grouped in 5 ‘zones’, all underpinned by the ‘freedom’ theme:
- Go where you want
- See what you want
- Say what you want
- Make what you want
- Join what you want
The exhibition doesn’t cover the usual territory that predecessors have – mid-century modernism; rather picking up in the ’60’s and coming right through to the present – and the near/now future, including the self-driving car. It’s packed with brilliant things to look at, read and imerse in. To be honest, the original concept paintings from Blade Runner are a highlight, and pretty much worth going to the show just for those.
I loved, loved, loved this exhibition.
We also took the opportunity to have a mooch round the Design Museum – which, actually was a bit unimpressive. There’s some lovely things, but it all seems very crammed in. They’ve given so much space over to the atrium/centre of the building, that it feels like the exhibits are secondary, which is a real shame. However, I loved seeing these typographical design systems for Britain’s roads, and the beautiful Kohnioor font from the Indian Type Foundry.
We lunched after at The Bluebird cafe in Chelsea. There were martini’s, obvs.
The ‘California: Designing Freedom’ show at the Design Museum runs until 15 October 2017, so there’s still time to take in the California vibe. To purchase tickets, visit the Design Museum’s website.
I’d planned to do loads of things in July. What I hadn’t planned on, was getting ill and having to cancel pretty much all of them.
At the beginning of the month I had my penultimate tattoo appointment, at least for the near future. Valerie, who does my tattoos won’t be working from September for 3 months at least, so with a few intensive 4-hour sessions, it brought to a natural conclusion the work we have been doing over the past year. My sleeve is nearly finished, just one gap to fill and a few touch-ups and embellishments to do on my back and we’re done. I didn’t set out to have a full sleeve, but once the tops of my arms were done, it seemed like a natural extension – and I love it. More about that once it’s finished.
I had the tattoo on the Friday and started feeling under the weather over the weekend, and right into the week, getting worse as the week went on. I had a working dinner with colleagues at Iberica on the Wednesday night, and just thought it was a touch of flu/general under-the-weather-ness. By the time Friday came, I knew it was more than that.
I had tickets to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition on the Friday afternoon, and despite feeling pretty rotten and having developed a hacking cough, I took myself off for a look round. However, by then I knew that I was ill so I cancelled my plans for the weekend, as I was due to attend a two-day course and I knew there was no way I could get through that. I’d booked an Introduction to Coaching course with The Coaching Academy and was really, really looking forward to it so was pretty upset to cancel. Luckily they’ve let me rearrange to a date in August, so all is not lost.
I was also booked on a British Red Cross First Aid Course for last week, a 3-day intensive training session that results in an accreditation as a registered first-aider. We needed someone at work to volunteer and I figured it’s a valuable skill to have. Not only that, it might help me with some of my squeamish issues about the body! However, by Monday morning it was clear all was not well. I could barely leave the bed or sofa and had no energy and a worrying cough.
Looking up all the symptoms and advice online it seemed that I had viral bronchitis. The advice is plenty of fluids, ibuprofen/paracetamol and rest – oh and that you don’t need to see the doctor for a viral condition. So I stayed on the sofa for 3 days flat. Well, not flat actually, as the cough meant I couldn’t actually lay flat without almost choking to death. At one point, I was really worried that I couldn’t breathe and although in some ways I felt a bit better, by Thursday it was obvious I needed to see the doctor. A phone-call to the surgery got me a telephone consultation and a same-day appointment. It’s the first time in all the time I’ve lived here that I’ve needed to use my local doctor and I was mightily impressed with the speed. The phone consultation is such a good idea to triage people.
The doctor pretty much immediately diagnosed a chest infection and prescribed antibiotics. She scared me a bit saying if it got worse over the weekend they’d look to take me into hospital for IV antibiotics, but by Saturday morning I was feeling better than I had all week – coughing less, though still badly at night – and was even up to a trip outside the house, my first in 8 days other than the cab to the doctors. Never has a trip to the supermarket seemed so exciting!
But there’s one other thing I had to cancel. Today I was meant to be doing the Race for Life with my two friends Mel and Katie. I was really looking forward to it and was sure I’d be fine by then. But all I managed today was a brief trip to Rottingdean to get some sea air for an hour and more resting on the sofa.
I’m desperate to get back to work and get back on with life. The First Aid course has been rescheduled to October, so I haven’t lost the opportunity and there’s always next year for the Race for Life. Hopefully, if I can now recover properly with the drugs doing their job, I’ll at least be able to go to the Friday Summer Party for a few hours at the end of the week. Fingers crossed.
Too soon our stay in Palma was at an end, and it was time to up sticks to Soller, a town about 40 mins away by car. But we’d decided not to go by car, instead taking the wooden narrow guage 105 year old train through the countryside to our destination. The Ferrocaril is a train that leaves from the Plaza de Espana Station in Palma, and heads to Soller with a few stops along the way.
We arrived and were able to buy tickets on the day, although it was very busy. We had a drink at the lovely little cafe, because, as usual we had arrived really early and then we went onto the platform to get the train.
It was pretty chaotic, with a bit of a bunfight to get on the train once it had arrived. It was impossible to know if everyone who was waiting would get on, and there was a bit of pushing and shoving – bit like getting on the Central Line in rush hour.
We managed to get on, but there were no seats left so we stood in the gap between the carriages. It turned out to be quite nice, I suspect we might have had the nicest view through the countryside and into the mountainous Tramuntana region – though it was a bit weird going through the 13 tunnels close enough to touch them.
The scenery is lovely and there is a stop off point for people to get out and take pictures. Definitely not the quickest way to do the journey but certainly an experience. There’s more about the history of the trainline on The Other Mallorca site.
I hadn’t really twigged that we were in Palma the weekend before Easter, and that meant that our decision to get up early and take a walk to the cathedral was extra special, as there were lots of Palm Sunday activities going on. We were treated to the wonderful sight and sound of the cathedral choir warming up, of all the women buying elaborately tied palms outside the cathedral, of a procession of children and adults in green, shops with wonderful chocolate displays and everywhere we looked were gorgeous buildings and people holding palms – all bathing in the wonderful Spring sunlight.
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- Women buying palms
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- Ready for the procession
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- Palms everywhere
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- Cakes
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- Man resting with palms
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- Girl laughing with plams
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- Cholcoalte Easter chicks
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- Palma street
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- Outside the cathedral
We flew into Palma on Saturday, arriving about lunchtime. After all the stress of the week and Mum’s operation, it was great to be able to relax with a holiday and we didn’t waste any time once we got there – grabbing a cab from the airport to the Hotel Costa Azul, on the seafront. We’ve been to Palma before but about 10 years ago, and on a family trip – so this time, although we were not there long we were determined to get a good look around. The Costa Azul is a nice, modern, not expensive hotel. It wasn’t really hot enough to try out any of the pool or sunbathing facilities, but the room was good – large enough and perfect for our weekend in Palma.
After dumping off our bags and changing into shorts to suit the nice weather, we headed out. I was desparate for my first Aperol Spritz of the year, so we stopped off at a cafe a few blocks up from the hotel. ‘Cappuccino‘ turned out to be a bit pricey for a couple of drinks, but boy they tasted good. How is it when you get somewhere the first place you go in is always expensive?
Anyway, suitably fortified we headed off into town, walking along the seafront towards the cathedral. We spent a good couple of hours wandering around, intermittently browsing in the shops and stopping for drinks. Perfect Saturday afternoon shopping. I was particularly taken with the C&A, as we haven’t had one of those in the UK for years. It was like a trip down memory lane, and I got a really nice denim jacket 🙂
We stumbled across a cute looking restaurant, called Restaurante El Pilòn. It was a lovely looking small place, and it served a nice varitey of dishes. Everything seemed homemade and the service was very attentive. We had some traditional tapas and everything tasted good. The house white wine was a bit sharp, but the hospitality was top-notch and the bill very reasonable.
After an obligatory siesta, we headed back out, grabbing a cab into town and straight to the bar at the Puro Hotel for excellent cocktails, followed by stunning tapas at El Cuerno, which is just around the corner. The food there was fantastic – the best Pulpo A La Gallega I’ve ever tasted, and a welcoming homemade herbal alcoholic shot. The food, staff, drinks and ambience were all great – would recommend and definitely go back if I was in Palma again, and it wasn’t too expensive.
An excellent first day in Mallorca.